4 ms·

Not sure if this solves it, but as a relatively heavy twitter user and as someone who REALLY would like an e.g. Mastodon to succeed, the lack of something like

• Spivak 4y ago
  Huh? Your universal handle is yourusername@your.domain, you can follow anyone on any instance (moderation polices of your chosen instance notwithstanding). Search I get, decentralized search is hard without centralizing because you can’t even know all the Mastadon instances that exist. Just like email Mastadon is open federation.
  • tensor 4y ago
    Search can always be provided like it is for the web. Third party indexing servers that crawl the network. That's ok, even good maybe.
  • wrycoder 4y ago
    Well, email is used by some, and there's no search or big directories. Isolated communities that hear about each other by diffusion is not a bad idea.
    • jrm4 4y ago
      Right. But that's a completely different thing from twitter.
  • jrm4 4y ago
    Yes. I think you're probably saying better what I meant to say -- though again, even the "one username" thing makes things much easier. I suppose what Mastodon unfortunately misses is that "microblogging" ain't like email: it's supposed to be done publicly -- so, unlike email where you're likely to have a small group of people who mostly know each other -- immediate identification of "who's talking" is far more important?
• palata 4y ago
  For anything to be a universal handle, you need everything to support it. Will every single project start using this protocol? Probably not. So it won't be a universal handle, just another account.
• hinkley 4y ago
  Before blockchain was the only thing anybody wanted to talk about, there were other systems that divided up trust between parties into dimensions, such that establishing whether a chain of events happened or not was an exercise of combining a bunch of independent facts and suppositions to come to a conclusion. One that sticks out in particular is a time service. I don't know who April is, and I don't know if you're April. All I know is that someone claiming to be April sent a message intended for an alleged Barbara at 11:34:23 PDT this morning. That's all anybody trusts me to do, and that's all I claim to do. We could divorce identity from these chat services in a similar way, but we keep making the mistake of trying to positively ID people like you would for a court case, and that's not what's needed most of the time. All we need for the happy path is a way to verify that you are the same person who claimed to be this identity a month ago, instead of someone impersonating you. The problem is that if it's free to create identities, then people can use it to do astroturfing or false flag situations. Vetting is a big place where things fall down because vetting and adoption fight each other in an arena called Instant Gratification. Also we haven't instilled the same sort of Stranger Danger on the internet that GenX and GenY got spoonfed about public spaces since they were old enough to talk.